Why Log4Net?

Microsoft has its own application block for logging. So, why should we use Log4Net instead of that?

Log4Net has some advantages over Enterprise Library Logging Application Block. These made Log4Net more preferable.

Works with .NET 1.0 & 1.1 - The much improved logging of EntLib 2.0 and above is only available if your application is running on .NET 2.0 or greater. log4net however works on all versions of .NET.

Simpler install - When using the Enterprise Library there are some services you really should install. This is as simple as running a bat file included with EntLib but it does complicate your deployment process.

Slightly faster - log4net was significantly quicker than EntLib 1.1 logging. EntLib 2.0 onwards has improved its performance but log4net remains slightly faster. A benchmark I found while researching my presentation had EntLib taking approximately 5-6 seconds to log 100,000 entries while log4net took about 3 seconds. Does the speed difference matter? Probably not. However log4net net does support…

Appender Buffering - Buffering support with some appenders lets log4net queue up log entries and write them in a single go. If you are writing entries to the database then buffering is a good way to improve performance.

More platforms - Enterprise Library does not support the .NET Compact Framework while log4net does.